For the past two years, ever since 18-year-old Michael Brown was fatally shot by a Ferguson, Mo., police officer, America has been enmeshed in a wrenching discussion about how the police treat young black men.

But this week’s blistering report from the Justice Department on police bias in Baltimore also exposed a different, though related, concern: how the police in that majority-black city treat women, especially victims of sexual assault.

In six pages of the 163-page report documenting how Baltimore police officers have systematically violated the rights of African-Americans, the Justice Department also painted a picture of a police culture deeply dismissive of sexual assault victims and hostile toward prostitutes and transgender people. It branded the Baltimore Police Department’s response to sexual assault cases “grossly inadequate.”

Baltimore officers sometimes humiliated women who tried to report sexual assault, often failed to gather basic evidence, and disregarded some complaints filed by prostitutes. Some officers blamed victims or discouraged them from identifying their assailants, asking questions like, “Why are you messing that guy’s life up?”

And the culture seemed to extend to prosecutors, investigators found. In one email exchange, a prosecutor referred to a woman who had reported a sexual assault as a “conniving little whore.” A police officer, using a common text-message expression for laughing heartily, wrote back: “Lmao! I feel the same.”

The inclusion of gender bias issues in the report stemmed from an aggressive push by the Justice Department, under President Obama, to improve the handling of sexual assault cases on college campuses and in cities and communities around the country.

Other “pattern or practice” investigations of police departments — including in New Orleans; Puerto Rico; and Missoula, Mont. — have also identified gender bias. In Puerto Rico in 2011, while examining discrimination against people of Dominican descent, Justice Department investigators cited a police department’s failure “to adequately police sex assault and domestic violence” cases, including spousal abuse by fellow officers. In New Orleans in 2012, investigators described a deeply dysfunctional force and found that the police “systemically misclassified possible sexual assaults.”

In Missoula, where the department also investigated a campus of the University of Montana, the inquiries focused specifically on gender and also examined the actions of prosecutors. In a 20-page report issued in 2014, the Justice Department said county prosecutors so thoroughly ignored rape cases that they were placing “women in Missoula at increased risk of harm.”

But experts and advocates agree that the problem is especially complex, and perhaps more acute, in Baltimore because so many women there are poor and black.

DOCUMENT

The Justice Department’s Report

A Justice Department investigation into the practices of the Baltimore police department found “reasonable cause to believe that the BPD engages in a pattern or practice of conduct that violates the Constitution or federal law.”

OPEN DOCUMENT

“Baltimore is worse in the sense that Baltimore is a city that has more people of color and more poor people of color, so we are likely to see more excesses, and that is manifest in the report,” said Lisalyn R. Jacobs, an expert on race and gender bias who works closely with the Obama administration on issues including sexual assault.

The Baltimore police commissioner, Kevin Davis, who vowed Wednesday to turn his department into “a model for the rest of the nation,” did not dispute the Justice Department’s findings. He said in an interview Thursday that he was already taking steps, including putting a trusted captain in charge of a new sex offense unit and assigning a sergeant to act as an “L.G.B.T. liaison,” to address the problems.

“The challenge of interacting respectfully with victims of sexual assault is a challenge to our profession,” Commissioner Davis said, “and we are getting better at it in Baltimore, and we are paying attention to it.”

African-Americans make up 63 percent of the population in Baltimore, and the city has been in the thick of its own painful conversation about race and policing since the April 2015 death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who sustained a fatal spinal injury in police custody. Tessa Hill-Aston, the president of the city’s branch of the N.A.A.C.P., said the Justice Department’s report this week had pushed the conversation about victims of police bias beyond black men.

“There’s a lot of women in the same communities that have been victimized just as much,” Ms. Hill-Aston said, adding of the police, “They just didn’t care, because it was a poor black woman or a poor black neighborhood.”

Civil and women’s rights advocates in Baltimore have been saying for years that the police do an inadequate job of investigating rape and sexual assault cases. In 2010, The Baltimore Sun reported that in the previous four years, the police had routinely failed to solve rape cases; in reviewing F.B.I. data, the newspaper found that the percentage of rape cases dismissed as false or baseless was higher in Baltimore than in any other city in the country.

But so little progress was made that Justice Department investigators felt compelled to raise the issue, though they did not formally cite the Baltimore police for violating women’s constitutional rights, said Vanita Gupta, the department’s top civil rights official, who supervised the report. “We were troubled by the lingering problems associated with gender-biased policing in Baltimore,” she said Thursday in an interview.

The Police Department’s lackluster investigation of rapes was of particular concern, the report said. From 2010 to 2014, the department found, rape kits, which hold forensic evidence gathered by doctors and nurses, were tested in only 15 percent of Baltimore cases involving sexual assault victims.

Officers failed to perform basic detective work, the report said.

One woman reported a rape by a taxi driver, but the department never tried to test the suspect’s DNA. Another woman reported a sexual assault by an unlicensed cabdriver, and although a detective identified a suspect, the police never tried to contact him, and the investigation faltered. Neither of these victims were named in the Justice Department report.

Photo

Tessa Hill-Aston, head of the Baltimore N.A.A.C.P., said many women had been “victimized just as much” as black men.CreditMark Makela/Getty Images

“We have many, many women who will never go to the police about a rape ever again because of the way they’ve been treated,” said Jacqueline Robarge, the director and founder of Power Inside, an organization that works with victims of gender-based violence, some of whom shared their stories with Justice Department investigators. Ms. Robarge said she had also recorded at least 15 interviews with women and had given them to the department.

Ms. Robarge added that she had worked with women who had been the victims of sexual misconduct by officers themselves. She recalled a 24-year-old prostitute who said a police officer had ordered her into his car and coerced her to have sex.

The woman, fearing retaliation, did not talk to investigators, Ms. Robarge said. But Justice Department investigators cited similar instances in their report.

“We heard complaints from the community that some officers target members of a vulnerable population — people involved in the sex trade — to coerce sexual favors from them in exchange for avoiding arrest, or for cash or narcotics,” the investigators wrote.

The report also described deep insensitivity on the part of some Baltimore officers toward transgender people, which reflected “underlying unlawful gender bias.” One transgender woman, for instance, said that an officer who was ordered to search her had protested in disgust, complaining to a colleague, “I am not searching that.” Then the officer turned to the woman and declared: “I don’t know if you’re a boy or a girl. And I really don’t care. I am not searching you.”

Commissioner Davis said he was committed to improving the treatment of sexual assault victims, and spoke Thursday of a “sea change” in policing culture.

In an interview, Capt. Steven Hohman, the commander of the department’s Special Investigations Section, which contains the Sex Offense Unit, declined to respond to individual examples in the report. “I believe that much of the work was being done,” Captain Hohman said. “We just weren’t very good at documenting.”

Experts agree that these problems are not unique to Baltimore. In December 2015, Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch, concerned by the findings of the inquiries in New Orleans, Puerto Rico and Missoula, issuedguidance to law enforcement agencies on how to prevent gender bias.

“We saw time and time again where women were discounted and officers would ask them: ‘Did you have an orgasm? Was this regret sex? Do you have a boyfriend?’” said Jonathan Smith, a former Justice Department official who supervised those inquiries, referring to the Missoula investigation. He added: “Those are privileged kids. Low-income women are facing sometimes worse.”

In each of those instances, the department demanded improvements as part of a consent decree, in which police practices are overhauled under the supervision of a federal judge. That will now be the case in Baltimore, Ms. Gupta said.

It’s Trans Awareness Week! In 2018, the representation of transgender actors and actresses on film and television has increased significantly. The '80s-set FX series Pose cast the highest number of transgender actresses as series regulars, while a successful campaign against cisgender actress Scarlett Johansson playing the role of transgender man Dante "Tex" Bill in the film Rub & Tug ensured that the […]

Hey Gang. While recording this White On White Crime episode, the wire issue with William's microphone got in the way so we have to use the secondary recording from the facebook live. We'll be replacing that microphone cord from The Wine Cellar Media this weekend and if that doesn't do it, we're finally going to […]

Hey gang. The title of this one came from a riff from one of the two stories getting hit up today. There is a George Zimmerman update and a new story about an attempted Racist murder that only got the murderer 4 years.

Hey gang. Let the folks down at Teen Vogue know that they need full time podcasters on ther staff. This is the Morning Wine Cellar for 11/13/18. William is here to do a solo riff real quick and we'll be back later for the evening Wine Cellar. https://www.patreon.com/WineCellarMediaFund http://PayPal.Me/PhoenixAndWilliam Police accused of threatening sex workers […]

Hey gang. We jump straight into an.... "Analysis" article by John Blake. We had an episode in 2017 where we dug into the question "What Is Woke" and now we're back on this term again. From there we tackle some headlines and stories briefly. Some fun audio is at the beginning and end for podcast […]

Morning Wine Cellar. Hey Gang. We open up with a brief riff on folks voting in their interests. From there, we jump over to Alexandria Ocasio Cortez being Melinnial AF. And we close out in Cameroon. Hey gang. We need to get our YouTube up to 4,000 subscribers before we can apply to monetize. Help […]

At least 79 students and three others, including the principal, were seized early on Monday morning in Bamenda, the capital of the North-West region, a government official has told the BBC. A massive search operation involving the Cameroonian army is now under way. Cameroon's North-West and South-West regions have been hit by a s ecessionist […]

Hey gang. Dropping in with a quick post election Morning Wine Cellar and I gotta get to the factory a little early today. Florida is going to let felons vote. JB Pritzker snagged up Illinois and Facebook let advertisers aim for that White Genocide click. Hey gang. We need to get our YouTube up to […]

Hey gang. This is one of those episodes that can't get a cohesive title. This is all over the place Wine Cellar News and Comment. We got our vote on over here in Illinois right before coming home and going live. But we got to do without being met with a racist and his German […]

Hey gang. Let's trigger warning it up. This is a quick Morning Wine Cellar. We jump right in with the story of a Trans Woman facing Sadistic abuse by the legal system. LINK - Dallas jailers ordered transgender woman to show her genitals, lawsuit says From we dive right into news updates out of Seattle […]

Hey gang. On this one Phoenix gives up the low down on recent Lena Dunham And Rebel Wilson news. We're not ready to play the audio from the Scott Beierle video that was captured and re uploaded. But there is some reading from the incel thread where the video was posted. There's an update on […]

Hey gang. This is a quick Morning Wine Cellar for 11/5/18. We rip through a SESTA FOSTA update in San Francisco and William briefly tangents from reading the name Kamala Harris. Sex workers already didn't have rights. SESTA FOSTA removed their ways of working around not having rights and increased the looming dangers they faced. […]

Hey gang. Of course we're gonna dig into the intraracial misogynist story. Though the original show prep was about Boyce Watkins and his guest speaker Cluade Anderson. You're going to hear wicked ideas about white women hunting black men and the glass ceiling being white women having equality with black men. Yea. Conservatives are […]

If you haven’t been following the strain of Black conservatives we’ve been following from The Wine Cellar, you may have missed the new narrative. These Black conservatives ARE NOT Republicans. For the most part, they’re non partisan and many of this particular crowd actually think legislation, bills, amendments, school board members, city ordinances etc: don’t […]

Hey gang. In this one, we jump right in with the title story. We move over to a disturbing story that ends with a white man being arrested safe and alive. In a better world, we'd handle that different. We take brief look at Chinese activity in Africa. Then do some extra time on Coach […]

Hey gang. In this one, we hop in with some #BeckyLivesmatter news. A bit of Nazi and KKK for sale... For X-Mas? Then we take a look at this "Twitter War" between Candace and Tomi and why I find it interesting. We close out with a glance down in Australia. WE NEED 4,000 SUBSCRIBERS ON […]

Hey gang Maddie Stump comes through on this one for a much less entry level episode on Trans Rights. We know each other from the Facebook and have never interacted verbally before. We used Skype to record so there are the moments of our voices bumping into each other. Overall, Maddie lit this episode up […]